One of my resolutions this year was to “go digital.” From my 2009 Resolution list:
“I’ve been working on this one for a while now, and I expect to be done shortly. The two big focus areas of this one are: getting rid of all VHS tapes and getting rid of all cassette tapes. I am winning both of those battles and hope to have the house clean of both items shortly. That leaves music CDs, which are also slowly being ripped and copied up to the server. LPs are not really a problem at this point; I have a few, but they are more for artwork than listening now. I do have a few that need converting over but that is way down near the bottom of the list.”
I’ve been working on this for a while now, and I know some of my friends like Herby and Earl have been too. If you’ve started moving all of your music, files and photos on to the computer, here’s something you may not have thought about: How on earth are you going to be able to find anything? Moving everything on to your PC isn’t going to help you if you can’t retrieve it!
Best I can tell, there are two solutions.
The first way involves organizing everything on your computer so that you can easily find your data without the use of an index. This involves doing a bit of thinking before you get started. For example, I am almost halfway done moving all my MP3 files to a network drive. Currently, the folder contains 255 GB of music; that’s 3,908 folders and 63,187 files. If my music wasn’t organized, can you imagine how long it would take me to find Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby? (Too long, too long!) The way my music is organized is, I have a single folder (mp3) and then folders underneath that one (mp3 – Videogame Music, mp3 – Christmas, mp3 – Audio Books, etc.) Then, of course, there’s a huge directory called “mp3 – music” which contains the majority of my files. Underneath that folder are five additional folders – A-E, F-J, and so on. It’s not the greatest system in the world, but as a test just now I was able to click on “mp3 – music”, “U-Z”, “Vanilla Ice – To the Extreme,” and listen to “Vanilla Ice – Ice, Ice Baby.mp3” all within a matter of seconds. Lucky me.
The problem with this method is that it does not lend itself to looking at organizing your data in multiple ways. For example, if I want to find an album that starts with the letter “V”, this works great. If I want to find “all classic rock albums I own,” it doesn’t work at all.
Another problem with organizing your data in this way is either organizing your data too much, or not enough. I have gigs and gigs of eBooks. Those things are hard to organize. “Technology” is too big of a folder; under that one, I added “Computer Related.” That too ended up being gigantic. Eventually I ended up with a squirrel’s nest of folders (ie: “TechnologyComputer RelatedOperating SystemsWindows 2008”). The trick is to find a level and style of organization that makes sense to you personally; after all, it’ll be you who’s trying to find things at a later date!
At a minimum you’ll want to become friends with the Windows search utility; Google’s Desktop Search is better and faster.
The second solution involves creating an index — or, in laymen’s terms, “maintaining a list.”
Lists are most useful for data that is not stored directly on your computer, but rather on removable media (CDs, DVDs, removable hard drives, or, God forbid, floppy disks.) When you store files you will put them on media. The media will get put somewhere. The goal of a list is to track what file is on what media, and ultimately, where that media is stored.
Lists can be made using a variety of programs. The simplest form of list is a simple text file. This is probably the simplest to create but the most difficult to sort. Without additional utilities and/or trickery, it’s pretty hard to “query” a text file. One big step up from a plain text file is a spreadsheet program, like Microsoft Excel. Once your data is stored in a spreadsheet, you can do all kinds of things with it — for example, you can alphabetize it with the click of a button. You can also sort your list based on multiple criteria (sort your music by genre first, and then alphabetize it). If you want to build more advanced queries, you’ll want to move toward a database program like Microsoft Access. Once your data has been migrated into a database you can do all kinds of queries, the only limit at that point being the amount of information you have in your database. With enough stored information you can easily find out which albums you’ve bought in the past 90 days, which movies star Harrison Ford, or a list of all your “fighting games.” If you want to take things one step further, you can put all your data into a SQL or MySQL database. That’s where my data is now. With these web friendly back ends, you can easily build web-based front ends that will allow you to query your list no matter where you are, physically.
Right now even though I’m using both methods, occasionally I’ll think of something that I’m not able to find. At that point it becomes a mental game with myself as I try and second guess “where I would have put something.” My eventual goal is to get things so organized that anyone walking in would be able to find anything I’ve filed. I’ve got a long way to go to reach that point.
Recently I changed my 101 Goals to include getting my digital media organized. I have nowhere near that amount of music (my MP3 collection tops out at ~1350 songs) but I want to tackle organization before I move on to copying CDs etc.
You can organize your music in folders yourself if you like… but I have finally given in and realized that allowing other programs to do the work for me takes a lot of stress and micromanagement out of the mix. Sure Winamp with the big playlist was a workable solution, but that was when I only had 200 songs. I would now recommend these two tools to get your MP3 collection in line:
* A music player with a Media Library function. iTunes is the industry standard, of course, but everyone else has copied it and the features are pretty handy. I run Listen Media Player on my Linux machine – it’s very lightweight but lets me choose songs by year, genre, artist, track name, album (or combine the selections to narrow further). Of course this relies on proper ID3 tags – what good is the tool if you have 30 files named Unknown Artist – Track 01? – so that brings me to the second tool:
* An ID3 tagger with mass-tagging features. The one I use currently is called easytag. It is not the most user friendly tool, but it is really powerful because it brings together filenames and ID3 tagging (for example, if you have a folder of properly-named MP3s that lack ID3s, you can copy the filename info into an ID3 tag automatically by defining a string that matches your naming convention… e.g. “%a – %t” would be Artist – Title) What’s really great about this setup is that once you get everything properly tagged, easymp3 can rename your files and set up your directory structure for you using the ID3 info from each file. SUPER handy.
Anyway, that’s my solution. I was a diehard folder organizer up until my wife’s experience with iTunes convinced me otherwise – watching her import a completely unstructured MP3 library and then be able to find anything she wanted with a few keystrokes was a real eye-opener.
My suggestion would be to check out XBMC for Windows. I think it will do everything you are wanting. You can search by Album, Year, Genre, etc. It also handles any kind of video files if you have those as well. It will do pictures also. I think that is all the items you need to do.
If you have setup questions, give me a call or mail and I can help you since I just did it myself trying to get it setup (can be a bit tricky to get the scanning setup at first, but not hard really). The only limitation would be that you’ll need to set it up on multiple computers if you want to use it from more than one. I think that another copy would read the .db files though, so that is probably easy too.
The only thing that might take a bit of work for you is you might possibly have to do some reorganizing of your folder structure or file name conventions because for some things it requires the structure to comply with a regular expression that it is looking for of course. I think your structure would be pretty compatible though already. I imported several music files into it and it got the info 100% correct on them. They were scene releases, but still think it would work nearly as well as crappy iTunes for the music.
Best of all it is free. Download it and give it a shot and let me know if it works or doesn’t work for you.
properly tagged mp3s in itunes or any other media player of choice would solve every one of these problems. once you start using smart playlists there’s no going back.
To answer your question “How on earth are you going to be able to find anything?” — easy. I find EVERYTHING, using <a href=”http://www.voidtools.com/”Everything.
At least, where file names are concerned. The trick, therefore, is to have a directory structure and file naming convention that makes sense to you and is somewhat future-proof. However, in the case of mp3, there’s nothing more important than proper ID3 tags. Period.
What you do with them is another story entirely, the details of which I’ll spare you for now. And yes, I prefer to set those manually. By hand. Typed in and researched for accuracy (again, another topic entirely). To re-iterate: proper ID3 tags are absolutely essential. The end.
I gotta toss in another vote for good tagging practices. Accurate tag data was sorta important when I got my first iPod years ago, but with each new iteration, the value becomes even more apparent. Having complete metadata makes grouping and doing playlists much easier. And with Dede’s iPod Touch, having the album cover art embedded in the file makes CoverFlow look so much better! (I totally geek out on CoverFlow!) I swear by Mp3tag by Florian Heidenreich. It’s a free, powerful, fast, & easy-to-use tool to edit your MP3 music file metadata tags and it’ll even embed album art directly into the MP3 files, which I’ve done on well over 90% of our library.
I undertook a big project to convert all of our music to digital format a few years ago and haven’t looked back. I still have the physical media stored, but rarely use CDs anymore after I’ve got the disc ripped. I still do prefer to purchase music on CD since I can rip to a higher-than-average bitrate quality and I use only MP3 format for compatibility-sake. With very few exceptions, nearly all of my music is arranged in an Artist | Album | Song structure and the filenames are (almost) always just the song title itself, without track number, artists name or any other clutter.
Like Jason said, once your media is digital, backups become all the more key. Although drives are typically far, far more reliable these days, the question (still) is rarely IF your hard drive will fail, but WHEN.